Crime in the Caribbean

In the shadow of the gallows

Trinidad debates the death penalty

“WE NEED the death penalty…that is the word of God,” said Benjamin Agard, a Pentecostal pastor, in his funeral sermon last month for Cecil Carrington, a retired police officer shot dead by bandits at the small hotel he owned on Trinidad's windswept east coast. The funeral came a fortnight after Trinidad and Tobago's prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, promised to remove legal obstacles to hanging, offering a parliamentary debate on February 18th.

Her stance is popular across the English-speaking Caribbean, where murder rates have soared since the 1990s. Her country suffered 472 killings last year—close to 5% of all deaths. In 1999 there were just 93. Almost everyone can name a friend or relative who has met a violent end. Last year's murder rate, of 36 per 100,000 people, was seven times that in the United States and 30 times that of Britain. But it trailed Jamaica (53), Belize (42) and tiny St Kitts-Nevis (40).

Rulings from the London-based Privy Council, still the final court of appeal for most of the region, have made it much harder to use the noose. The most important was a judgment, in 1993, which held that execution cannot take place more than five years after sentencing. In practice, exhausting all routes for appeal usually takes much longer than that.

Overturning Privy Council rulings requires a constitutional amendment. In Trinidad that needs a three-quarters majority in parliament, and hence opposition support. Barbados, a much more tranquil island, completed a similar process in 2002, but has made no moves to hang anyone since. With anger running high over violent crime, Trinidad and Tobago is unlikely to take this relatively laid-back stance. If the opposition were to be brave enough to resist hanging, it would be blamed for every subsequent murder.

Many politicians privately admit that hanging will not halt crime. The death penalty hardly acts as a deterrent, since only a tiny proportion of murderers are arrested, tried and convicted. Ten men were hanged in Trinidad in 1999, nine of them members of the Dole Chadee gang, a notorious drug mob. But killings resumed in a fortnight.

The most recent Caribbean hanging was in St Kitts-Nevis, a few days before Christmas in 2008. With only 50,000 people, the country had been shaken by 23 murders that year. The next year there were 27. In practice, even in Caribbean islands where hanging is not carried out, murders are often followed by the death of the perpetrator, gunned down either in gangland reprisals or by the police.

If they really wanted to stem the violence, politicians would do better to try to stem the trade in illegal guns, which are plentiful and cheap. Trinidad and Tobago's foreign minister noted last month that many arrive on drug boats from South America. But his government in September cancelled an order for three 90-metre patrol boats, which with planned helicopter support and an existing fleet of smaller boats and coastal radar might have staunched the flow. Other guns are rented to criminals by police or soldiers, said the national security minister.

The police and the judiciary also need reform. For its part, Trinidad and Tobago's overstaffed intelligence agency was caught last year tapping the phones of the country's president and several journalists, but it has had little impact on the drug gangs.

Mrs Persad-Bissessar's People's Partnership coalition swept to power last May, with a manifesto that did not mention hanging. She promised a “multi-pronged approach” to the “political, economic, social, technological and managerial dimensions” of security. “Punitive sanctions alone” would not solve the problem, the manifesto declared. But voters seem to want quick fixes. They should study Suriname, which suspended the death penalty decades ago, and suffers just four murders a year for every 100,000 people.